If ever there was a symbol in Western culture giving the lie to the scholarly adage that fixed images do not have fixed meanings, it is the heart. Signifying tender attachments of love (whether friendship or romance, or both) it was ubiquitous in the elite literatures and arts of courtliness in the Middle Ages and remains, I would hazard, universally intelligible to this day. Still, for the medievalist interested in the potentials, realized or not, for symbols to move across cultural and political boundaries and to acquire or shed meanings as they do so, the symbolism of the heart provides an interesting test case. By the end of the twelfth century, the heart as a symbolic of passionate, erotic attachment was widely represented in courtly literature, in German-speaking lands and, of course, in French cultures. It signified as an integral part of an ensemble of images that were securely embedded in a discourse of courtly love whose defining characteristic was that it was noble, practiced and cultivated by aristocratic elites as a form of self-fashioning separating them from other estates and social groups. To overstate the case: originally it was not a universal image; it was primarily a class-based one. The question then becomes: when and how does the image of the heart symbolizing tender attachment begin to migrate out of the elite discourse of courtliness and into a wider realm of popular culture, meaning ordinary or everyday culture? What aspects of its association with tender attachment might it accentuate, retain, or discard? ….
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